Will Global Warming Revive Good Journalism?

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"Media coverage of climate change is at a crossroads, as it moves beyond the science of global warming into the broader arena of what governments, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens are doing about it," reports Cristine Russell. She points out that the growing global warming beat offers "countless" angles for reporters to explore "on a story that is only going to get bigger and more complicated in the decades (yes, decades) ahead." Journalists, she writes, "will play a key role in shaping the information that opinion leaders and the public use to judge the urgency of climate change, what needs to be done about it, when and at what costs. It is a vast, multifaceted story whose complexity does not fit well with journalism’s tendency to shy away from issues with high levels of uncertainty and a time-frame of decades, rather than days or months."